Quotes from Katherine Ashenburg

Naturally, etiquette books order handwashing before as well as after meals, but the practice also appears, with a frequency that borders on obsession, in poetry. Poets found it hard to describe a banquet or even a meal without affirming that everyone washed their hands.

The Roman bath culture died slowly, fizzling out at various times and places in the waning empire. Ironically, as political and economic troubles made it difficult to maintain the great thermae where the people bathed, bishops, popes and emperors continued to build and enlarge lavish baths in their residences. From being a resource for all, the baths declined into an aristocratic preserve.

By the eighth and ninth centuries, mistrusted by the Christians and neglected by the Germanic conquerors, the baths in the West had fallen into disrepair and were finally abandoned. Extraordinary achievements in engineering, architecture, public health and city planning that stretched from Italy to Britain to North Africa, they mostly lay in ruins for centuries.

the hamam remains the only living descendant of the Roman bathing tradition, and it was via the hamam that the Roman custom would return to medieval Europe.

The so-called Hygiene Hypothesis, first voiced by Strachan, is that our immune system needs a certain amount of bacteria on which to flex its muscles. Deprived of it, the white cells that are designed to fight bacteria, called Th1 lymphocytes, fail to develop, and the other white cells, Th2 lymphocytes—those designed to make antibodies to defend the body against microbial dangers as well as to produce allergic reaction—will take over.

English innovation was the indoor toilet, as opposed to an outdoor privy. Beginning about 1770, such an accommodation was known in France as the "lieu à l'anglaise," or "the English place.

But far more than the Jewish quarter or the bestequipped monastery, the cleanest corner of early medieval Europe was Arab Spain. Unlike in Christianity, cleanliness was an important religious requirement for the Muslim, and a ninth-century observer described the Andalusian Arabs as "the cleanest people on earth.

One of the Spaniards' first actions during the Reconquest was to destroy the Moorish baths.

We are concerned about the environment, but we avoid thinking very much about the gallons of clean hot water we use every day and the toxins in our cleansers that we pour down the drain. Living up to our hygienic standards takes huge amounts of energy, but cleanliness is such a sacred cow that to be told "cut down on your washing" would be even more repugnant than being urged to restrict our driving.

When Dickens designed false bookcases and books to disguise the door from the drawing room to his study, he invented a seven-volume series facetiously called "The Wisdom of Our Ancestors." In addition to volumes called Superstition, The Block, Ignorance, The Rack, Disease and The Stake, was one simply titled Dirt.

The accumulated sweat, dirt and oil that a famous athlete or gladiator strigiled off himself was sold to his fans in small vials. Some Roman women reportedly used it as a face cream.

Submerging the body in water while washing it was a lost practice, and people recovered it gropingly and tentatively. That a doctor would write an article in 1861 called "Baths and How to Take Them" may seem slightly comical to us, but her audience was grateful for professional guidance through unfamiliar territory.

poverty was not always a disadvantage at the baths. Far from making everyone equal, nudity imposed its own hierarchy, one that frequently favoured the toned body of the poorest freedman or slave over that of the indulged, unexercised rich man.

Piped-in water on every floor and multiple water closets and baths had been feasible since the mid-eighteenth century, but few people, even prosperous ones, took advantage of the technology until a century later.

The decline of the baths was due more directly to the fall of Rome than to the rise of Christianity, but there is no denying that the three events—one apparently mundane, but close to the heart of Roman civilization, and two with vast, long-term consequences—were intertwined

During the sixteenth, seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries, when people avoided water and believed that a clean linen shirt extracted dirt, there was little or no demand for toilet soap. The rich women who used it, mostly on face and hands, thought of it as more a cosmetic or perfume than a cleanser.

the cleanest corner of early medieval Europe was Arab Spain.

or with the nails, in the manner of dogs or cats, and not with a napkin, but with a toothpick of mastic wood, or with a feather, or with small bones taken from the drumsticks of cocks or hens." —Erasmus, "On Good Manners for Boys

When the Viennese doctor Ignaz Semmelweis insisted that delivery room doctors and medical students wash their hands before attending their patients, he was ridiculed, even though the practice dramatically reduced death from puerperal sepsis. In 1865, when Semmelweis died, his simple but radical idea was still discounted.

The bath, except for medical reasons when absolutely necessary, is not only superfluous, but very prejudicial to men," the French doctor Théophraste Renaudot warned in 1655. "Bathing fills the head with vapors. It is the enemy of the nerves and ligaments, which it loosens, in such a way that many a man never suffers from gout except after bathing.

Just as the Cleanliness Institute closed its doors in 1932, a casualty of the stalled economy, Aldous Huxley published his satire of a sanitized utopia, Brave New World. It's doubtful that Huxley, living in England, had heard of the Institute, although naturally enough there are parallels between its emphasis on indoctrination and social pressure and the vastly more extreme measures taken in the novel's odour- and germ-phobic future civilization.

struck fear into medieval hearts—hot baths, which had a dangerously moistening and relaxing effect on the body. Once heat and water created openings through the skin, the plague could easily invade the entire body. For the next two hundred years, whenever the plague threatened, the cry went out: "Bathhouses and bathing, I beg you to shun them or you will die.

The English word loo for toilet may come from 1) lieu à l'anglaise, the French term for toilet, or 2) Gardez l'eau! (Watch out for the water!), called to alert passersby that chamber pots were being emptied from upper-story windows into the street.

most people associate bidets with France, and the French word is used in English, Spanish and Italian, it was the Italians who invented an oblong vessel,